The Sisters' Tale
by TheWomanWhoCodesAndWrites
Summary: The story of the five girls who made Johanna Mason and carried her through the Quarter Quell and her imprisonment, even when there was no one left that she loved.


_My take on Johanna's past, inspired by four writer friends (I'll let you guess who you are ;)). Enjoy, all of you!_

**The Sisters' Tale**

**I. Christina**

Christina Mason might have been happy and bubbly, but by no means stupid.

She knew that Johanna's cries and whines meant nothing most of the time. Her second youngest sister was just a plotting, scheming little critter who attempted to shift all the blame on the baby, Paula. Usually, she would just let the two teenagers be, taking a small distance from the matter. Sometimes, though, she would indulge Johanna and blame Paula even when it was _Johanna_'s fault. At twenty five, Christina was wise enough to know that any skill deserves its own recognition, no matter how small it was. She had spent her childhood and teenage years getting ridiculed for carrying her sketchpad and pencil. While she had accepted that her sketches might never see the light of day, she wouldn't wish the same for Johanna and Paula. Life in District 7 wasn't colourful or happy, and she was determined to let her sisters paint their lives with their own colours.

Their father was a strange man, Christina knew. He had been strange since the day Paula was born. He had hoped for a boy. Instead, he got another daughter, a girl who ended up _killing _his wife. Christina had spent a good part of the next eight years hiding Flora, Vanessa, Johanna, and especially Paula from their drunk father, sending the two older girls out in the dark with the wailing babies as she took their father's beating brunt by brunt. She didn't waste her time, though. As soon as she turned nineteen, the old drunk was out of the picture, killed swiftly by vermin poison mixed inside his drinking flask.

in the morning of the 71st Reaping Day, Christina found herself sitting under the old tree at the back of their house, sketching her four sisters as they stood talking nearby. Johanna and Paula looked beautiful in their new dresses, Christina proudly noticed. She'd worked extra shifts in the Paper Mill, snatching every extra coin she could, to give the two girls the privilege of new dresses. Something would happen this year, she had sensed. The way Paula always got in trouble for talking back to teachers, the whispers that Vanessa had been attending rebel meetings with her lumberjack crew members, the fact that they had just laid Flora off her teaching job for having 'questionable methods', all pointed to their family. In some ways, it was a blessing that Paula hadn't been a boy. They couldn't reap two girls. Not when it wasn't Quarter Quell year.

"Feeling sappy?"

Christina looked over her shoulder, at Johanna who stood there looking.

"Nope," she answered, smiling at her sister. "I'm just doing what I'm good at."

It was that sketch they found in her skirt's pocket, folded carefully and coloured, as they pulled her from under that heavy machinery which crushed her chest. Inside it was a short, hand-drawn memo addressed to her newly crowned, Victor sister.

Christina Mason was giving her sister Johanna a smiley and two thumbs up.

**II. Flora**

Flora Mason might not be frank and blunt, but it didn't mean that she didn't have fire inside her.

She grew up angry at herself, for not being able to stand up against their useless father - until that fateful night of his death, when she'd stood away and pretended not to see as he gasped for help. She spent her short teaching career hating whatever she told her students to do, knowing that it was all a lie and that the Capitol didn't care - until she'd had enough and began telling them her original stories. At twenty two, she could proudly say that she burned with a silent fire, the kind well-hidden and well-concealed from the rest of the world.

She had always been good in escaping into the world of stories, she realised. And that was what she was doing, as she made her dazed, guilty way towards the Justice Building, to say goodbye to her little sister Johanna. Johanna, a woodland princess, winning the 71st Hunger Games by pretending to be something she wasn't. That was one neat plot, one neat scenario.

"You're going to win," she reassured the sniffling, _angry _fifteen year old, as they sat on that plush couch. "They won't know what you can do with an axe, you're a small girl. They'll think you're weak. Use it against them."

"Yeah, sister," Johanna snarked, laughing through the tears. "You know me well."

"I do," Flora simply said, grasping her sister's shoulders. "And that's why I told you that. You'll be meek. You'll train in secret. You'll come behind them all with your axe, and be the _Victor_."

She was surprised, in all honesty, that Johanna ended up doing just _that. _As she laid dying in the burning kitchen's floor floor, her insides shattered by those brutal arsonist who'd first attacked her, she closed her eyes and thought of a different world. It would burn with the bright fire of the revolution, with a bunch of youngsters in the midst of it, including Johanna.

Flora Mason died _laughing, _in the midst of a fire.

**III. Vanessa**

Vanessa Mason might be feminine, but by no means meek.

She knew that she was beautiful, that there would be men willing to die for her if she'd wanted them, but she was strong enough not to go that path. By the age of twenty, she'd forged her own path being a secret rebel and a productive lumberjack, and an efficient sponsorship campaigner for her little sister Johanna. She had never once stopped, not even after Johanna had won. Every morning, she would make that walk down from Victor's Village, towards the forest where her lumberjacking crew was. They would pick fight with her out of pettiness, and she would fight back like a warrior. Vanessa never cared about who was listening to what she'd said. She would rather die than being something she wasn't.

"What in the hell is this, Jo?" she confronted Johanna one day, as her Victor sister returned from the Capitol _limping _and _bruised._

"Nothing," Johanna brushed her off. "Go mind your own business."

"Screw my business," Vanessa seethed. "I'll really strip you naked here and check if you're not telling, so you'd better tell me."

Johanna looked at her, looking subdued for a moment. Then, she told all.

Vanessa went out to the forest the next day, as calm and nonchalant as she usually did. By the time her lunch break came, though, the story of how President Coriolanus Snow had prostituted all the Victors had spread throughout the woods, in whispers and shouts and anything in between. Vanessa never came home that day, or the next day. The next time she saw Johanna and little Paula was when she stood before the firing squad at the district square, battered and bruised and maimed yet unrelenting.

Vanessa Mason looked her executioners in the eyes, haunting their sleeps for years to come, as they drilled bullet holes in her.

**IV. Paula**

Paula Mason might have been the baby, but she could confidently say that she was way beyond her years.

She had been only fourteen and a half when her year-older sister Johanna was reaped, thrown in the Hunger Games, and crowned Victor. She had been only fifteen when the third of her four sisters was executed in public, leaving her with Johanna who had hardly been home. There had been dark months of confusion and anger afterwards, she remembered. Then, everything came out in an explosive fight, and she had never been the same since. Paula Mason was burning with all she had, bright like a star just before its death - because she knew she had just been waiting.

"I'm off working, Brainless," Johanna said that morning, one and a half years after that fateful reaping day. "I'll see you when I get back."

"I hope," Paula replied.

They didn't hug. They didn't kiss. They couldn't anymore, after everything which had happened. Attachment hurt, they'd both learned. After Christina, Flora, and Vanessa, they didn't dare to care anymore. It cut too much. Survival was much easier.

Two days after Johanna left, Paula went and threw a firebomb on the Peacekeepers' Headquarters. They tore her shirt off her back and whipped her fifty times straight away, not even waiting for her sister to come home. She was still alive, though, when Johanna rushed home the next day. Barely alive, delirious and laughing.

"Make them pay for this," she chuckled out to Johanna, as her sister knelt frozen next to her sickbed.

"I will," Johanna said, running a tentative hand on Paula's hair. "They will pay for this."

Brown eyes met brown eyes, deep and silent. Then Paula slipped away, away, away, far away into the darkness.

"I love you," she heard a faint voice.

She opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came out then.

**V. Johanna**

Johanna Mason might be broken, but she hasn't given up.

At nearly twenty, she has lost her four sisters through a fault of her own, and is living with it each day. It's cold and dark, she knows. And it hurts, but she keeps going. She will keep going, she knows, as long as she has her memories.

She thinks of Christina, sketching her picture in her new dress, as her name is drawn a second time.

She thinks of Flora, plotting stories and telling her scenarios, as she dashes around the Quarter Quell arena, the rebels' plan fresh in her mind.

She thinks of Vanessa, unyielding and brave, as water washes over her and a painful, burning jolt shakes her body.

She closes her eyes and thinks of Paula, defiant to the end, as she hears explosions and gunshots outside her cell.

"Johanna," a foreign voice says to her. "Come on. We're here to get you."

"About damn time," she laughs out. "Let's go."

**FIN**


End file.
